Instrumentos

FRANCE

Unfortunately, almost immediately, the French Revolution was co-opted despite our best efforts. Not that it was ever really our Revolution. Despite what our more prideful kin would tell you, the Kindred rarely have the power and freedom to directly shape mortal society. We Brujah can at best nudge revolutionaries and then fume when our enemies nudge back. In France, those enemies were not the Ventrue for once. The Inquisition had decimated the so-called “Kings” who barely maintained any influence over the Ancien Régime. No, it was the Toreador under the leadership of Francois Villon who adroitly undermined us. A whispered word here and

there, and the Montagnards wiped out the Girondists whom we supported and ushered in the Reign of Terror. The bloodshed quickly grew beyond even Villon’s power to contain, but the results suited him just fine, as every single mortal suspected of being an agent of the French Brujah lost his head. Within ten years, Napoleon had crowned himself Emperor, and when he proved inadequate for the job of conquering Europe, Villon blocked our efforts to preserve the Republic while the monarchists who subsidized his decadent lifestyle helped the Bourbons back onto their old throne. The Brujah of France were never fully defeated, though, and France has been a hotbed of revolutionary thought ever since, with Toreador-influenced governments repeatedly brought down by popular revolt. Finally, the rise of the Third Republic in 1870 ended the monarchy for good, and in the twentieth century, the Toreador and the Brujah actually joined forces in the face of Nazi invasion. The Camarilla denies any Kindred involvement in the rise of Hitler, but you’ll never persuade me that the Third Reich doesn’t have the fingerprints of some Ventrue bastard all over it. Anyway, in the aftermath of World War II, a surprisingly conciliatory Francois Villon made many concessions to his Brujah allies.

The era of détente between the French Brujah and Toreador ultimately allowed for an intriguing cross- fertilization of ideas between artists and revolutionary ideas, one that had its origins in an unusual movement among the kine: The Situationist International. Born in the aftermath of World War II, the Situationists were a group of artists, political activists, and armchair revolutionaries drawn together by a common interest in neo-communist theory and avant-garde art. The group, which was Marxist in nature but opposed to the authoritarianism of the communist dictatorships of the day, sought to use surrealist art to critique the role capitalism played both in destroying the quality of human life and in making a global fetish out of rampant consumerism. The Situationists earned the name because of their belief that it was possible to counteract the pervasive spectacle of capitalism by creating “situations”: moments of self-awareness and self-discovery that would inspire individuals to reject mass media culture in favor of the pursuit of their own individual needs and desires. Initially a purely artistic movement, the SI became increasingly anarchist and revolutionary in character, culminating in its role in the 1968 insurrections at universities across France and Belgium. After that apex, the SI’s influence declined until its dissolution in the early 1970s.

Whatever influence the Situationist International had on mortal politics, it was definitely influential among the Kindred of France, especially a small coterie of artists and

activists who had been effectively shut out of the Paris art scene by more traditionalist Toreador who were scandalized at the idea of using art as a vehicle for revolution. Dada and Surrealism had been around for decades, and in France they had been important avenues for Kindred artists, particularly Malkavians, the more avant garde Toreador and, of course, the Brujah. Generally, however, the intensely conservative French Toreador establishment rejected those movements as serious art. However, of all the Kindred Situationists, only the Brujah would go so far as to see surrealist art as a weapon to use against their political opponents.

Brujah Situationism manifested as an effort to use artwork to galvanize public opinion and undermine Camarilla authority in a way that the Camarilla leaders could barely even understand, let alone suppress. Some Situationists made heavy use of performance art, often using their powers to compel others to perform strange acts in public places that confused or enraged onlookers. Others found ways to incorporate their Kindred disciplines into works of art or musical performance that could affect viewers. In the 1980s, the Situationists incorporated magical techniques derived from the so-called Punk sorcerers who had been forced to flee Britain for France. The extreme countercultural themes that impregnated Punk Sorcery were a good fit for the absurdist revolutionaries of the Situationist movement, and members who had initiated themselves into Punk Sorcery devised several art-themed rituals designed to shock and infuriate the Toreador art establishment and, by extension, the Toreador Camarilla leadership with which it was largely synonymous.

AMERICA

Let me take a step back for a moment. Across the Atlantic, the American Revolution was generally better for our aims. Some of our elders insist that the Brujah played a direct role in the Boston Tea Party, and that the Idealists advised many of the Founders on how to establish a modern democratic state free of the excesses of monarchy. I don’t know about all that, but I do know Crispus Attucks ended up in our Clan, so that’s something to be proud of.

From our perspective, the results of the American Revolution were imperfect but largely successful. The main sticking point was that the Southern states were unwilling to consider any federal interference in the slave trade, let alone abolition of it. According to some tales, this obsession with chattel slavery was driven in part by the presence of Autarkis vampires — mainly Ventrue, Malkavians, and

BRUJAH 40

Toreador, but with a surprising number of Tremere and Setites — who were using the slave plantations as herds and, in some cases, as fodder for vile blood magic experiments. I don’t know if there’s any truth to that, but many Brujah elders who supported the North in the later American Civil War considered the abolition of American slavery to be a small revenge on the Ventrue for the fall of Carthage. Today, the Brujah may not control American democracy, but we have ensured that no other Clan does either. In the 1940s, a Brujah Justicar forbade the Prince of Washington, D.C. from interfering in the affairs of the federal government, a fact that rankles the odious Prince Vitel to this day. Of course, the 1940s would also mark another important moment in our history, this one taking place on the opposite side of the country, but I get ahead of myself.

RUSSIA

Our third major revolutionary effort was perhaps our most successful, but also the one about which our Idealists are most ambivalent. In 1917, after decades of planning, a council of European Brujah engineered the fall of the Tsarist regime and exterminated the Kindred alliance that had quietly dominated Russia for centuries. While the Brujah Council’s influence over the Soviet Union fluctuated over the coming decades, their hold on the Soviet Kindred would be nigh absolute... until 1991, when something woke up and apparently killed them all. After a quarter-century, we still don’t know what it was, and neither does anyone else. For the moment, the Brujah mostly ignore the issue. Let the Ventrue and the Tremere send their spies and assassins to certain, if mysterious, death.

From the start, the Soviet experiment was troubling to many in our Clan. Our traditions call for us to seek a closer relationship with the kine (at least to the extent permissible under the Masquerade) and to seek individual freedom for ourselves and egalitarianism for all. The Menshevik faction of the Revolution best represented the ideology of the Russian Brujah. Unfortunately, the Mensheviks lost rather decisively to the Bolsheviks, forcing the Brujah revolutionaries to make the best of things. The “best of things” ended up being a brutal totalitarian society as repressive as anything ever fashioned by the Ventrue. By some accounts, the death toll attributed to Stalin is greater than Hitler’s, particularly if one subscribes to the view that the 10 million or so Ukrainians who died during the Holodomor (a famine so severe that it was given a name) died by deliberate genocide rather than mere grotesque incompetence.

It is unclear whether the Brujah Council ever directly controlled Stalin in any way, and certainly not enough

to stem his abuses. On the other hand, the Council had enormous access over the Soviet society as a mechanism for spreading communist revolutionary thought. During their regime, the Council was quite free in financing Anarch activities around the world; so much so that when the Council fell, Anarch cells across the world were caught flat-footed and put at a serious disadvantage in their revolutionary activities.